Stinnett -- whose previous historical work was a suck-up treatment of the elder George Bush's war years -- purported to have new, recently declassified documents to support the idea that FDR was involved in a depraved political plot against our brave boys in uniform. But despite the book's surface appearance of being an earnest and meticulous investigation -- complete with lengthy footnotes and reproductions of dozens of important-looking bits of paper -- it's not hard for a careful reader to see the bilge water pouring out of it.

It's not just that Stinnett's "evidence" -- if it can be dignified as such -- is at best ambiguous and circumstantial. It's not just that his theory, like most classic conspiracy theories, conflicts with reams of other available evidence and tries to make us believe two or more mutually exclusive things before breakfast. It's also not just that he -- for all his apparently knowledgeable blather and the truckload of "documentation" he dumps on us -- apparently doesn't understand some important realities of cryptology and signals intelligence. It's not even that it is impossible to believe that Roosevelt -- who was, without a doubt, wily and subtle -- might have perpetrated such a Machiavellian plot. No, the real reason to think there's no pony in this pile is Stinnett's relentlessly dishonest -- dare I say "deceitful"? -- characterizations of documents, incidents and testimony.

As with other such conspiracy books, "Day of Deceit" received reviews in responsible academic journals like Intelligence and National Security that demolished it, citing its nonexistent documentation, misdirection, ignorance, misstatements, wormy insinuations and outright falsehoods. The consensus among intelligence scholars was "pretty much absolute," CIA senior historian Donald Steury told me in an e-mail. Stinnett "concocted this theory pretty much from whole cloth. Those who have been able to check his alleged sources also are unanimous in their condemnation of his methodology. Basically, the author has made up his sources; when he does not make up the source, he lies about what the source says." In other words, even if Roosevelt were genuinely guilty of these charges, "Day of Deceit" couldn't possibly convict him.

Typical of the kind of porous and dishonest evidence "FDR knew" theorists promote are the "coded naval intercepts" Vidal praised Stinnett for having "spent years studying." Again, Vidal either never actually read Stinnett's book or was -- in spite of his intellect -- somehow dazzled by the book's hurricane of bullshit exhibits. Stinnett's supposedly assiduous study of Japanese intercepts amounts to only a series of rhetorical scams. The most contemptible of these comes during his jumbled discussion of whether the Japanese maintained radio silence during the approach to Hawaii. (It is a crucial argument of conspiracy theorists that the Japanese fleet was detected on its way to Pearl Harbor by radio direction finders around the Pacific, and that FDR supposedly deliberately withheld the location and movements of the Japanese carrier task force from his Hawaii commanders. But if the Japanese did not use their radios en route -- and they have always insisted they didn't -- they couldn't have been found by the radio direction finders.)

After noting several incidents that prove little more than that there could have been a late transmission on Nov. 26, Stinnett goes on to say that he, the intrepid investigator, discovered 129 intercept reports that indicate that the Japanese didn't maintain radio silence during the approach to Hawaii. (None of them are reproduced in the book.) Stinnett then blandly states that these intercepts came from a three-week period from Nov. 15 to Dec. 6. In other words, all of them could have been obtained before the fleet ever left Japanese waters, and before radio silence was imposed. I don't know how Stinnett could believe that his readers wouldn't notice this critical detail, but then, most of the book displays little respect for our intelligence.

Nevertheless, like other conspiracy books before it, Stinnett's was eagerly clasped to heaving right-wing bosoms from sea to shining sea. One enthusiastic reader at Amazon.com, for example, opined that people who could not accept Stinnett's thesis were obviously "brain-washed with liberal red fascist, left-wing extremist, pagan atheistic infanticidal merchant of death beliefs that won't let them face the real ugly truth."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"